Americans who took down terrorist were childhood pals

They were childhood pals on a European jaunt, three young Americans who began the day as tourists and ended it as heroes praised by the presidents of two countries.

As their high-speed train whizzed through the French countryside near the Belgian border Friday afternoon, Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler were startled by the sound of a gunshot, then by the sight of a railway employee sprinting past them down the aisle.

They saw a man brandishing an automatic rifle and other weapons. A conductor tried but failed to subdue him.

“I looked back,” said Skarlatos, who saw the guns. “So me and my friends got down.”

Instinct should have told him to stay there. Instead, with a look at Stone and a cry of “Let’s go!” Skarlatos and his buddy were on their feet, running toward danger, not away from it.

The gunman tried to fire at them, but the guns jammed.

Stone reached the bare-chested attacker first and grabbed him by the neck, while Skarlatos wrested one of the man’s guns away from him. The assailant whipped out a box cutter and began slashing at Stone, who didn’t release his grip.

Stone suffered a number of cuts, including one that nearly severed his thumb.

Sadler and a British businessman, Chris Norman, joined the fray, pummeling the gunman and helping to hogtie him on the floor of the train.

“It all happened so fast,” Sadler said. “We heard the word go, and everyone just got up.”

The Americans’ quick actions, which they described in media appearances Saturday, averted a potential bloodbath, but for friends and family, their courageous instincts came as no surprise.

They had grown up together in the suburbs of Sacramento. As young boys, Stone and Skarlatos were into sports and paint ball and dreamed of careers with the military or law enforcement.

They watched older brothers go into the California Highway Patrol and the Navy. The three stayed close even after Skarlatos moved to Roseburg, Ore., to live with his father and attend high school. He worked at a Costco and joined the National Guard.

Ending a nine-month deployment at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in June, he returned to the U.S., according to the National Guard. He reenlisted last month for two more years in the Guard and is currently assigned as a rifleman. While in Europe, he visited Germany before meeting up with Stone and Sadler in Amsterdam.

Stone, an Air Force paramedic, had been stationed at Lajes Air Base in the Azores, where he worked as a medical technician in pediatrics and with expectant mothers.

Sadler, a senior at Cal State Sacramento, was seeing Europe for the first time.

The three men decided to take the vacation together before Stone was reassigned from Europe at the end of the year, according to Sadler’s father, Anthony.

They almost didn’t get on the Paris-bound train because they were considering staying another day in Amsterdam, according to Skarlatos’ brother, Solon.

Their plans were casual, said Skarlatos’ mother, who kept in touch with her son on Facebook.

Authorities identified the gunman as a 25-year-old Moroccan national known by European security officials to have ties to Islamic terrorist organizations. French media identified him as Ayoub El Khazani and said his fingerprints matched those taken by Spanish police during a major drug-trafficking investigation in 2013.

Authorities are not ruling out a political or ideological motive.

Media reports say Ayoub El Khazani has denied any links to terrorist groups and has claimed he found a cache of weapons — a Kalashnikov, nine magazines, an automatic pistol and a box cutter — in a bag in a park in Brussels and had intended to rob passengers on the train.

“He was there to do business. That’s for sure,” Skarlatos said in an interview on French television.

As Sadler and Norman helped tie the gunman up, Stone — despite his injuries — helped another passenger who had been wounded in the throat, stopping his bleeding until paramedics arrived.

Throughout the brief but terrifying episode, Sadler said, “The gunman never said a word ... except to demand his gun back. ‘Give me my gun, give me my gun,’ he said.’”

A passenger described as a French American was reported to be in the hospital for treatment of a gunshot wound suffered in the attack. Stone was also expected to undergo surgery for his injuries, which are not life-threatening.

Anti-terrorist officials say Ayoub El Khazani is on an “S-list” — a security watch list — in France as well as in Spain, where he was living in 2014, and in Belgium, where he turned up in 2015. Suspects on the list are noted for their “links with terrorist organizations,” but not all are under 24-hour surveillance.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the man’s name had been communicated to France’s intelligence services last year. There were unconfirmed reports that the man had traveled to Syria, once again raising the fear of Islamic State jihadists returning to Europe to carry out terror attacks.

Intelligence sources told the newspaper Le Monde that the suspect, who, once in custody, was transferred from Arras in northern France to the anti-terrorist brigade headquarters at Levallois-Perret just outside Paris on Saturday morning, initially refused to answer questions except to give his name, age and nationality.

kim.willsher@latimes.com

christopher.megerian@latimes.com

zahira.torres@latimes.com

Special correspondent Kim Willsher reported from Paris, Megerian from Sacramento and Torres from Los Angeles

Times staff writers Henry Chu, Thomas Curwen and Gale Holland contributed to this report.

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